The Trouble With E-Mail

Among Internet users with secrets, including bankers, lawyers, hackers and people who visit porn sites or confide in friends — so that would be all of us — there’s a widespread apprehension that the Web is no longer a safe place to spill them.

You can see that wariness in e-mail, which for years has been considered a spontaneous and freewheeling form, better known for gaffes and rants than anxiety and circumspection. As recently as 2008, Will Schwalbe and David Shipley described e-mailers as inveterate hotheads in their manual “Send.”

“On e-mail, people aren’t quite themselves,” they wrote. “They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.”

Oh, how times have changed. The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.

And that’s why some bankers developed “LDL.” “LDL” — which means “let’s discuss live” — is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C.’s investigation of Goldman Sachs for its role in the nation’s financial shame spiral. How do the pros use it? Goldman’s Jonathan Egol is the first known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage investment in e-mail as “a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb enough to take first time around,” Egol shot back: “LDL.”

See how that works? Wanna talk about junky mortgages? Let’s get off the %#^ Internet.
It works with other topics, too. Problems at home? LDL. State secrets about Egypt? LDL. How much you paid for your house? LDL.

“LDL” and its equivalents — tonal inversions of the carefree LOLs of e-mail past — are the most succinct ways Internet-users now express the desire to ditch the Web and seek analog pastures. And as much as the banker chat that was revealed in e-mail seems galling, it’s the rare Web-user who’d willingly submit his own e-mail archive to prosecutorial scrutiny. LDL, for those who have the option, is an extremely good idea. Nearly everyone needs some form of communication that’s not searchable, archivable, forwardable, discoverable and permanent. Of course, the longing for more in-person exchange is also part of the broader nostalgia a time before the Internet, when copyright and privacy seemed enforceable, and traditional business models obtained.

These grander sentiments were on theatrical display scale last week at eG8, the Internet-themed prelude to the G8 conference in France. Both conferences, like other jetset global conferences, are the very definition of LDL, existing solely to facilitate actual, physical elbow-rubbing among human beings like Jimmy Wales, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

At eG8, McKinsey submitted eye-popping research that showed that Internet-related consumption and expenditure in the G8 nations is now bigger than agriculture or energy. As if freshly aware of this economic monster, scores of high-profile global lawmakers, including Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, then spoke of the Internet as wilderness that they intended to colonize with official government overseers.

But it’s not just French rhetoricians, using the language of the 19th century, to whom the Internet of today seems dangerously anarchic. Bloggers and others now chronicle their breaks from the Internet, periods of withdrawal from electronic communication. They also tighten privacy settings; they close Facebook pages. Their e-mails, texts and IMs become more pro forma and less expressive.

It’s been a year since the arrest of Bradley Manning, the army intelligence analyst who is believed to have yanked thousands of documents off the government’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. Manning passed those documents on to WikiLeaks using Tor Hidden Services, a secure network that protects users from surveillance and traffic analysis. WikiLeaks started to publish them. And then Manning appears to have described his feat in an online chat with a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who turned him in.

To many observers, the lesson of WikiLeaks was not about Turkey or Saudi Arabia or national security. It’s that no one’s online communication — not the government’s Secret Internet Protocol, not Bradley Manning’s hacker chatroom — is secure. WikiLeaks has become a kind of Ruby Ridge for some Web users: an event that crystallized the perception that the Internet is embattled and that spies are everywhere.

Suddenly it seems, as they used to say in Tintin comics, these walls have ears.

I see how this happened, but I can’t help but remember the day I became 73773.143@compuserve.com. It was 1993, and I’d clearly lucked into a good address — highly memorable with all those 7s and 3s. (That same year, President Clinton became 75300.3115@compuserve.com.)

With e-mail, my inhibitions about traditional conversation fell away: there was no blushing or lisping or stuttering on e-mail. If traditionalists who disdained typing or excelled at office banter felt left out by electronic communication, millions of other personalities were brought to life by it. In the early 1990s there were some 15 million e-mail accounts worldwide. By the end of 1999 there were 569 million. Today there are more than 3 billion.

E-mail, then, c’est nous. But we can’t say no one warned us. We’ve all seen too many crises, personal and public, not to know that e-mail is not a place for secrets.

Note: The reference to Bradley Manning has been adjusted to indicate that he is only under suspicion of having disclosed diplomatic cables and intelligence reports.

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Virginia Heffernan began writing for The Times in 2003 — first as a television critic in the Arts section, then as an Internet columnist at the Sunday Magazine. The co-author (with Mike Albo) of the comic novel “The Underminer,” she has been an editor at Harper’s and Talk magazines, and has written for The New Yorker, Mother Jones and Slate, where she was that magazine’s first television critic. She has a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. Her book, “Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet,” is forthcoming from Free Press.